Full scale monitoring of the twin chimneys of the rovinari power plant

The presented paper deals with the structural identification and monitoring of two twin chimneys in very close arrangement. Due to twin arrangement, important interference effects are expected to modify the chimney response to wind action, causing vortex shedding and state-dependent excitation associated to the oscillatory motion of the leeward chimney, in and out of the windward chimney wake. The complexity of the physics of this problem is increased by the dependency of the aerodynamics of circular cylinders on Reynolds number; however, there is a weakness of literature about cylinders behaviour at critical and super-critical range of Reynolds number, due to experimental limitations. Also the International Committee on Industrial Chimneys (CICIND) does not provide, at present, any specific technical guideline about twin chimneys whose interaxis distance is less or equal two times the diameter, as in this case. For this reason a Tuned Mass Damper (TMD) has been installed in order to increase the damping of the chimney, as merely suggested. This work aims at assessing the effectiveness of the installed TMD and characterizing the tower dynamic behaviour itself due to the wind excitation, as well as providing full scale measurements for twin cylinders configuration at high Reynolds numbers

Adding aerodynamic damping: the wing design for the Third Bosphorus Bridge

This paper is about the design of wing profiles adequate for giving to the Third Bosphorus Brige an additional aerodynamic damping on both vertical bending as well as torsional modes. The additional damping estimate procedure is made through a simplified quasi steady approach. A CFD approach has been used for a preliminary design and optimization of the wing profile and its position over the wind screen at the upwind and downwind location

A novel vortex-based velocity sampling method for the actuator-line modeling of floating offshore wind turbines in windmill state

The fluid-dynamic simulation of wind turbine aerodynamics is typically tackled by applying multi-fidelity computational tools. In this context, the so-called actuator line model combines a low-fidelity treatment of the rotor with a high-fidelity resolution of the wake. In this paper, a novel formulation of the actuator line model proposes a vortex-based method to sample the flow around the rotor to rigorously assign the forces imparted by the blades. This new technique is implemented into an in-house code developed within the OpenFOAM environment, and it is validated against wind-tunnel experiments on a laboratory-scale horizontal-axis wind turbine operated in fixed-bottom and floating conditions. The calculations are also compared against multifidelity simulations performed, on the same test case, in the frame of the OC6 Phase III project. The simulation results, obtained after a systematic analysis and selection of the model parameters, exhibit a remarkable agreement with the available experiments and place the present code in the proper ranking of fidelity levels, in-between momentum-balance methods and blade-resolved CFD models. Finally, the calculations for surge and pitch platform motions demonstrate the capability of the proposed technique to reliably predict the aerodynamics of turbine rotors in dynamic operation at affordable computational cost

Regularised Volterra series models for modelling of nonlinear self-excited forces on bridge decks

Volterra series models are considered an attractive approach for modelling nonlinear aerodynamic forces for bridge decks since they extend the convolution integral to higher dimensions. Optimal identification of nonlinear systems is a challenging task since there are typically many unknown variables that need to be determined, and it is vital to avoid overfitting. Several methods exist for identifying Volterra kernels from experimental data, but a large class of them put restrictions on the system inputs, making them infeasible for section model tests of bridge decks. A least-squares identification method does not restrict the inputs, but the identified model often struggles with noisy (non-smooth) kernels, which is deemed to be unphysical and a sign of overfitting. In this work, regularised least-squares identification is introduced to improve the performance of model identification using least-squares. Standard Tikhonov regularisation and other penalty techniques that impose decaying kernels are also explored. The performance of the methodology is studied using experimental data from wind tunnel tests of a twin deck section. The regularised Volterra models show equal or better results in terms of modelling the self-excited forces, and the regularisation makes the models less prone to overfitting

On the functional design of the DTU10 MW wind turbine scale model of LIFES50+ project

This paper illustrates the mechatronic design of the wind tunnel scale model of the DTU 10MW reference wind turbine, for the LIFES50+ H2020 European project. This model was designed with the final goal of controlling the angle of attack of each blade by means of miniaturized servomotors, for implementing advanced individual pitch control (IPC) laws on a Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) 1/75 scale model. Many design constraints were to be respected: among others, the rotor-nacelle overall mass due to aero-elastic scaling, the limited space of the nacelle, where to put three miniaturized servomotors and the main shaft one, with their own inverters/controllers, the slip rings for electrical rotary contacts, the highest stiffness as possible for the nacelle support and the blade-rotor connections, for ensuring the proper kinematic constraint, considering the first flapwise blade natural frequency, the performance of the servomotors to guarantee the wide frequency band due to frequency scale factors, etc. The design and technical solutions are herein presented and discussed, along with an overview of the building and verification process. Also a discussion about the goals achieved and constraints respected for the rigid wind turbine scale model (LIFES50+ deliverable D.3.1) and the further possible improvements for the IPC-aero-elastic scale model, which is being finalized at the time of this paper